Chinese Influence In New Guinea

Sydney Bulletin Writer Fears Communist Contacts

IN a scathing review of the conditions created in Papua-New Guinea by the Evatt-Ward regime, Malcolm H. Ellis, in Sydney Bulletin of April 5, accuses the late Socialist Government of Australia of giving away the Australian Territory of

Papua to the United Nations, instead of tying New Guinea more tightly to Aus tralian control, for the sake of Australia’s future defence.

Mr. Ellis expresses anxiety concerning the future role of the Chinese community in New Guinea. “There have been Chinese in New Guinea ever since the German times,” he says. “As everywhere in the tropics, they have the upper hand in the store trade. There are about 2,500 in Rabaul, 500 in Madang-Lae, 300 in Bougainville.

“While the argosies of the Australian Shipping Board have been able to carry little except cargoes of red-tape, boats arrive about every three weeks from China waters, mostly worked by Chinese or Malayan crews.

“There appears to be nothing whatever to prevent the Communist agents of the New China from infiltrating into New Guinea. There is certainly nothing to prevent them, once there, from fading into the country and spreading Moscow’s glad news to their hearts’ content, since the old-time walking patrols which used to saturate the whole land far from the coast with authority have become a thing of the past. The new bureaucracy ap parently is incapable of motion except on wheels, walking being officially con sidered as undignified for the new apostles of culture as pickaback riding is for visiting Cabinet Ministers.

“New Guinea now has no Army, Navy or Security Police, and the only real de fence measure which appears to have been taken for some time in the scan dalously-wrecked Manus base, which has been in process of digestion by the jungle,

is its renaming as Tarangau, which means “blue-hawk,” in place of Lorengau, by which the local district station used to be called before the war.

“There is not even the skeleton of a defence fcrce —there was before 1939, thanks to the patriotism of the planters and others. There are no weapons, and the Malayan situation is quite possible of duplication within the next two or three years and in an even more disastrous at mosphere.

“Local Chinese, some in the third gen eration, have suited their sails to the new Communist breeze. As in the German time they suddenly ceased to be im perialists and plumped as one man for Sun Yat-sen, so now they have liquidated the Kuomintang overnight and wiped out the Nationalist party. Their very exis tence depends on trade with China, and if they expect to continue to live and thrive they must dance to the Chinese Communist tune. ‘TiIHIS facet of the situation is doubly X dangerous because of the property position. It is an axiom in the archipelagoes south of Asia that as soon as the Chinese begin to own the land they begin to own the country. The Germans knew that, and they restricted Chinese ownership of plantations to the west coast of New Ireland opposite Rabaul and to Manus in the Admiralties.

“The Australian Government, until the Ward-Evatt era, followed the same salu tary policy of restriction. But now that we are all Asian brothers it would be against UNO’s theories of racial equality to give the British and Australian im perialists privileges denied to Hottentots and kongkongs. So now the big and rich Chinese merchants are having a merry time buying up plantations—freehold, of course—from which Australian returned soldiers have been driven by the policies of Ward and Co. and fellow-traveller ad visers. There is cause for relief that Stalin does not want to buy land in New Guinea. He could scarcely be denied the right.

“New Guinea is a glorious example of how democracy triumphs—over the white man—in the tropics. The richest areas are rapidly becoming provinces of Mao’s Peking Soviet Union. The eyes are be ginning to be picked out of rich districts, and especially those near Rabaul.

“Samo plantation, one of the best in the Territory, recently was sold to the Chinese for £24,000 cash on the nail.

Herron’s plantation near Rabaul has been leased for £2,900 a year—no European bid higher than £1,600 came in. Chinese out bid all Europeans 100 per cent, in com petition for 10 blocks of land near Rabaul.

As far south as Bougainville the Chinese have begun to buy plantations and trading-stations.

“Meanwhile the coora industry shivers when it thinks of what will happen on the arrival of a lower scale of prices.

“The possible huge timber industry of this Great Dominion, which has a total area larger than that of NSW. is mori bund. With gold at a peak price the gold industry languishes, prospecting especially.

“New Guinea; including Papua, indeed has been gradually sinking to the level of Portuguese Timor, except in the bunga lows of the New Order, made comfortable through the fact that unskilled meddling with the native goes hand in hand with an atmosphere of restful toil, in which a small servant is still called a “monkey”— manki to the New Order itself—and the wherewithal is always available to officials to ward off the birau and the binafang.”

A daughter was born in Madang (New Guinea) recently, to Mr. and Mrs. Len Barnard, of Mt. Hagen.